Kim Jong-Il's Rogue Chef Gloomy on Future

Just about everyone else with any connection to the Korean peninsula
has weighed in on North Korea's succession drama and unprovoked
artillery attack on South Korea, so it was probably only a matter of
time until former personal chef to Kim Jong-Il and four-time author Kenji Fujimoto shared his views.
Fujimoto, who spent years as the dictator's cook before fleeing, left
behind his wife and two children but gained what has become a
lucrative career writing autobiographies as one of the few men outside North Korea who knows Kim
personally.

So what does Fujimoto think about the future of
North Korea as Kim Jong-Il recedes and Kim Jong-Un, the 26-year-old heir
apparent, steps up? The Wall Street Journal's Jaeyeon Woo reports from
Fujimoto's press conference that the chef-in-exile suspects the awful
status quo will continue.

In a meeting with a group of
reporters in Seoul last week, he said he doubted a recent change in
North Korea’s leadership is going to lead to positive policy changes any
time soon.

Kim Jong Eun, the dictator’s third son who’s emerged
as his likely successor, will ultimately have to open up the country,
above all, to feed people, Mr. Fujimoto said. But the younger Kim won’t
be able to do so in the near term because of his fragile standing in the
party.

“He will have no choice but to continue policies set by
his father at least for several years,” Mr. Fujimoto said. “So it’s not
until a decade later when a policy change, if any, would materialize.”

The Journal's Woo adds that Fujimoto is still discovering the outside
world that he knew so little about while living in the hermit kingdom.
"The regime’s tight grip on the spread of information was reinforced
during the presser when he said he never knew the existence of prison
camps while he was there," Woo writes.